The Plane That Saved Its Pilots | Air France Flight 2510
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 Published On May 14, 2021

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This is the story of Air France flight 2510. Accidents happen when tons of things go wrong. In most cases you just need one thing to go right in a sea of wrong for things to end on a happy note. That is exactly what happened on the 28th of march 2012. On that day an air france airbus a320 was making the flight from paris france to hamburg germany with uh we don't know how many people on board, information is scarce. As the plane approached Hamburg, the airport was changing things up. Until that point planes used runway 33 for both landings and takeoffs and but now runway 23 was the runway for landings and runway 33 was the runway for takeoffs. This was to account for a cross wind. You always want to land into the wind as that makes things a lot easier.

This meant some extra work for the crew of flight. They had set up an approach onto runway 33 but now they had to reprogram the computers for the ILS approach to runway 23. But thats not too hard, soon they were lining up with the runway, their plane had latched onto the localizer of runway 33 and they were number 2 to land. The day was windy, the pilots decided to go for a flap three landing instead of a full flap landing. That just meant that they wouldn't fully extend the flaps during the approach.

9 nm from the runway their glideslope is alive and the pilots verify that they are where they are supposed to be using the DME beacon ALF. As all of this happened an air berlin 737 that had landed earlier was taxing around on the ground on its way to the terminal but it had to hold short of runway 23 on taxiway delta because flight 2510 was just about to land.

In the cockpit of the A320 a small diamond moved to indicate that the plane was below the glideslope but unknown to the crew the plane was actually above the glideslope. In the next 30 seconds this reading changed, the instruments now told the pilots that they were above the glideslope. The captain in response pulled power back and started descending at about 2900 feet per minute to get back on the correct glidepath. Satisfied with their efforts the pilots stabilized the plane and extended the gears. Suddenly their instruments tell them that they’re very low and nowhere near the glide path. The first officer suggests a go around, it was no use salvaging this approach. The captain agreed . The captain pitches the plane up to carry out the go around, hes rudely interrupted by his plane, it was saying “speed speed speed” warning him to pay attention to his speed. It was now at 143 knots. The throttles were advanced to the MCT to the minimum continuous thrust, but that wasn't enough. The plane's speed kept decaying. Soon the plane was at 121 knots which is dangerously low. This was serious. Suddenly the engines roared to life pushing the plane’s speed up and by extension out of danger. The pilots had to pitch the plane down a bit to keep the plane under control. The go around after that went flawlessly they got up to 4000 feet and then stabilized their airplane and then made a safe approach onto runway 33. The unknown number of people onboard made it off without a scratch and probably were unaware of how close they came to disaster.

To understand what happened here we must first look at the go around itself and figure out what happened there. The pilots were approaching the runway and suddenly the plane showed that they were dangerously below the glideslope. This prompted the first officer to suggest a go around. At this point the captain agrees with the first officers assessment, it wouldn't be safe and he pulls back on the stick for a go around. But he doesn't do o

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